The horse-drawn carriage stopped at the last crossroads before entering Bellflower Village. Ganendra climbed down without saying much. It felt like a long time since he had last seen this road—perhaps about a month.
In the past, this same road had always been filled with the voices of small-time merchants, children running around, and villagers busy carrying their harvests. But this time, not a single voice welcomed him home. There was only the wind blowing around him.
Ganendra furrowed his brow. He walked farther. The closer he got to the village, the stronger the unease in his chest became. Especially when he saw the state of the village gate. The village sign had split in two and hung limply from a post that was nearly toppled.
When Ganendra stepped through the village gate, he was met with a horrifying sight. The wooden buildings had been burned to charcoal, and parts of their roofs had collapsed. Broken carts, scattered fruit and food, and the villagers' clothes lay strewn across the road.
But something was strange amid the chaos before him. There were no human corpses anywhere. Because of that, Ganendra quickened his pace toward home.
Ganendra's steps grew faster when he saw that his house had also been damaged in the distance. Half running, he rushed inside.
“Mom!!” Ganendra shouted.
Silence.
Ganendra ran to his mother's room. The door stood wide open. No one was inside. The bed was in disarray, several pieces of clothing were scattered across the floor, and a flower vase lay shattered near the window.
“Mom?”
There was no answer.
Ganendra turned and headed for Liora's room. It was empty. Liora was nowhere to be found. The small blanket that was usually folded neatly had fallen onto the floor.
“Liora...?”
His chest began to tighten. He found no sign of either of them inside the house. Half running, Ganendra went outside and headed to his neighbor's house. But he found nothing there either. Once again, his mother and younger sister were nowhere to be found.
“Mom!” Ganendra's voice echoed among the ruined houses. “Liora!”
But just as before, there was no answer.
Ganendra's eyes narrowed as he swept his gaze over every inch of the road, the fear growing increasingly difficult to conceal. He was breathing hard, and his hand trembled around the hilt of his weapon.
Ganendra searched every corner of the rubble again, looking for signs of his mother and missing sister amid the chaos. Then a thought occurred to him. Tartono.
Ganendra hurried to his best friend's house, hoping that his mother and Liora had fled there. But that hope collapsed once again. Tartono's house was no different from the others. It was destroyed.
Ganendra stood before the ruins, his chest heaving. “Tartono!”
“Don't tell me you too...” Ganendra continued, clenching his fists as silence greeted him once again.
Ganendra turned away. He left Tartono's empty house and headed back home. He forced himself to remember every corner he might have overlooked. There had to be something he had missed.
When he reached the yard, Ganendra's steps came to a halt. He knelt on the partially blackened ground and brushed aside the hot ash with his bare hands, ignoring the lingering heat. He removed the wood fragments one by one. Nothing. He found no clue at all.
Ganendra let out a harsh breath. “No way...”
He went back inside the house. This time, Ganendra examined his mother's room carefully. His eyes swept over every corner. The clothing rack, the table, the window—even the space beneath the bed—none of it escaped his inspection. The result was still the same: nothing.
In the midst of his despair, Ganendra entered his sister's room. It was still as messy as before. But just as he was about to turn away, something caught his attention. A branch near the window was moving slowly.
Ganendra frowned as the branch waved back and forth as though blown by the wind. Yet there was no wind blowing.
With slow steps, Ganendra approached the window. That was when he froze. A massive tree stood firmly right beside Liora's room. Its trunk rose high, its leaves growing thick and lush, filling part of the yard he remembered as empty ground.
“Since when...?”
Ganendra jumped out the window. Slowly, he reached out and touched the tree's trunk. Traces of energy still lingered within it, so faint they were almost impossible to sense.
Ganendra narrowed his eyes. He had never seen a tree like this growing around his house. What was more, there had not been a single tree here a month ago.
Ganendra lifted his face and watched the leaves moving without any breeze.
“What happened here...?”
His gaze then dropped. He saw something glittering beneath the tree. He crouched down and began brushing aside the leaves covering it. A small bracelet lay among the tree's roots.
Ganendra froze. He recognized it. “Liora...”
His hand immediately reached for the bracelet. It still held a little dirt and fragments of leaves. Even so, the bracelet remained intact and unbroken.
“Why is your bracelet here?” Ganendra whispered, clutching it tightly.
His gaze shifted to the massive tree before him. For the first time, the fear in his chest changed into something else.
A suspicion. Liora had been here. And perhaps... she had not left willingly.
That hope drove Ganendra to search again for evidence he could use as a clue besides Liora's bracelet.
Ganendra searched around his yard. His eyes moved quickly, looking for any clue. Then something white caught his attention. A small piece of cloth was caught on the tip of a fallen branch by the roadside.
Ganendra walked closer. His hand reached for the cloth. The moment he saw its pattern, his breath caught. He recognized it. The cloth had come from his mother's clothes.
“Mom...”
His fingers tightened around the scrap of cloth. Ganendra's gaze shifted toward the forest stretching behind the village. For a moment, he simply stood there, trying to push away the terrible possibilities beginning to fill his mind. If his mother had left the house with Liora, why had this cloth gotten caught here? And if they had been taken away...
Ganendra tucked the scrap of cloth into his pocket, then turned and looked over the entire village that had been reduced to ruins.
“Hold on, Mom.” He slowly exhaled. “I'll find you.”